Open Nights on Hold
As we’ve all been told to stay home for the time being, open nights will not be taking place.
We’ll still be maintaining our online presence, so please drop by our discord for a chat, or post on the Google group.
Category Archives: Hackspace events
New Event: York Hackspace inaugural Hackathon (aka the Finish-a-thon!) 28th July
If you’re anything like us, you have a pile of half-finished projects (or half-baked ideas) sitting around gathering dust.
That’s why we are having a one-day community Hackathon and the theme is Finish a Project! Don’t worry if you have a huge project that might take longer to finish, just finish a part of it. The event is free and open to everyone to attend, if you don’t have a project you can help someone else.
The event will take place from 10AM to 10PM on Saturday, 28 July at the ‘space.
The day will kick off at 10am with (free!) breakfast, followed by a chance to tell everyone what your plan is for the day, and perhaps canvas some help!
Feel free to pop in and out throughout the day.
What can you work on at the hackathon?
You can work on anything, it’s a really open Hackathon.
Are you coding something you want to finish?
Want to fix a bug in an open source project?
Finish writing something, design something?
Finish a craft project you have lying around?
What should I bring to the hackathon?
Bring whatever you need, although the hackspace will have some parts/materials and tools available.
Bringing a laptop is a good idea.
This is a one-day event so be ready to take home what you make.
Hope to see you on the day! We have a facebook event here
Questions?
Please contact us using any of the methods below!
Twitter • 
Facebook • 
Instagram • 
Google+ • 
Mailing List • 
GitHub • 
Telegram
You said… We do!
If you follow us on social media or are a member of our mailing list, you have probably seen our survey asking you for your ideas on what we can change to make the space (still open here).
You asked us to…
Rearrange to make more space
We’ve rejigged the space to make it a bit more collaborative and to make it a bit more open:
More opening times to non members
We have a regular Saturday open day (hackSaturdays!) planned, roughly once per month, in addition to the regular Wednesday Open Nights. Keep an eye out for notifications via twitter, facebook and the blog!
(i’d like to learn) Laser cutting
We have a laser cutting workshop in the pipeline, watch this space!
New Event: hackSaturdays!
Wednesdays have been Open Nights since version 1.0 of York Hackspace, way back when we used to meet in the Black Swan. However, we understand that weeknights aren’t the best time for everyone to visit the space.
We are therefore pleased to announce that we are starting up hackSaturdays: different day, different time, but the same original recipe as the Wednesday Open Evenings.
Our first hackSaturday will be from 10:00 until 16:00 on Saturday the 10th of February.
Want to know how to find us? Click here
For more details about our open nights, see the wiki.
Curious about what to bring?
All you need is yourself, enthusiasm and curiosity. Feel free to bring a project, things to make, things to do, things you want help with, or things you just can’t find time to do elsewhere.
What does the hackspace have to offer?
You’ll be free to use whatever tools and facilities you want, subject to the necessary training and/or supervision. Non-members will be expected to contribute towards hardware, electronic components etc (members get all this stuff for free!) if it’s more than a few bits and pieces. We have a fast Internet connection sponsored by Andrews & Arnold which you’re welcome to use. And a tuckshop!
Questions?
Please contact us using any of the methods below!
Twitter • Facebook • Instagram • Google+ • Mailing List • GitHub • Telegram
Extra Open Evenings in May. Come and look around.
Open Evenings at the space in May.
We’ll be running a couple of extra open evenings on Thursday 25th and Tuesday 30th May for people who want to come and look around the hackspace but are unable to attend our regular Wednesday night open evenings.
Same time as usual, 8pm-11pm.
See https://york.hackspace.org.uk/wiki/Weekly_Open_Evening for more information including how to find us!
2016 was a great year for York Hackspace
Many things happened in 2016. Lots of the people reading this probably have mixed feelings about this past year. But at least we can all agree, I hope, that it was a great year for York Hackspace.
As we, the hackspace went into 2016, we had our own space with 24 hour access. Members could make use of the space whenever they wanted to. This space was in Stonebow house. Sadly we had to leave Stonebow quite early into this year. We knew that this was coming and it helped us by forcing us to keep moving forward. Within six months we had moved into a bigger space with easier access and registered as a company. Our membership has grown and we hope that it continues to grow. If you’ve not seen our new home in Fulford business centre, you should come and check it out!
Our new space at Fulford Business CentreOur fifth birthday was this year, and it fell on a Wednesday, so we decided to have a celebration combined with a sort of space-warming party on our open evening. There was lots of food, including this giant cookie…
Our much-loved spaceship disaster game Spacehack has had another spin around the galaxy UK as we took it to four maker events. It was at the UK Maker Faire in newcastle, EMF Camp, Manchester Makefest and the Derby Mini Maker Faire.
Spacehack at Derby
The hackspace blog is also looking much more active than it did at the start of the year. We hope to engage with makers as much as we can, and sharing the interesting things that go on at the hackspace is something that helps us do that. We even got our fifteen minutes of fame from hackaday this year. Seven and a half of those minutes with a post about Spacehack. and the remaining seven and a half with a post about John’s LED tetris table.
John’s world-famous tetris table
So it’s [almost] time to say goodbye to 2016 and find out what exciting things 2017 has to offer. I hope you can join us and help to make it a good one.
Want to learn how to use Blender?
We’re having a workshop on the evening of Thursday the 15th of December. “Introduction to Blender”
Mark your calendars (or sign up to our google calendar) to make sure you don’t forget to join us.
Anyone is welcome to come along, it’s not just for members.
For all the details, you can see this wiki page: https://york.hackspace.org.uk/wiki/Introduction_to_blender
The workshop will probably cover these features in approximately this order:
- basic concepts
- modeling
- textures and lighting
- rigging (armatures)
- animation
- basic physics simulation (including particle engines)
By the end of the workshop, you might be able to make something like this (or better)…
Let’s light the space for Christmas
We can’t avoid it any longer, Christmas is arriving soon.
The most import part of Christmas is, of course, finding as many flashing lights as you can and concentrating them all in one area. Any good hackspace should be full of flashy lights at Christmas. So if you have a cool project that’s mostly just flashing lights, you should definitely bring it to the hackspace next Wednesday and show us all how it works! Let’s light up the space with all the pretty LEDs we can.
To get us started, I’ve brought along a couple of my projects, repurposed slightly to create a more festive atmosphere.
But it’s not all about lights. Continuing the tradition of previous years, it’ll soon be time to gather in a pub somewhere in York city centre and have some drinks to celebrate. You’re welcome to join us if you like!
I found some LED strips that were not doing much, so they’re now decorating the mains trunking
I also threw together a raspberry pi and an old project that had a scrolling text display on it. It’s difficult to photograph, you’ll have to trust me that it looks okay to the human eye. You can send it a new message if you’re connected to the wifi.
We are now five years old
We celebrated our fifth birthday last Wednesday! (26th of October)
The first real YHS meeting was on October the 26th 2011 at Guppy’s enterprise club. (See our history page.) This was timed quite nicely, the exact day was a Wednesday this year, no need to break the open evening rhythm.
We lit up the space with all the LEDs we could find, filled a table with food and proceeded to disorient ourselves with a combination of alcohol and VR games.
A plethora of party snacks.
For such a special occasion, there had to be a giant double-layer Millie’s cookie with the York Hackspace logo recreated in icing.
